This is Why They Want to Kill Me... My Story | Harvard Speech

 This is Why They Want to Kill Me... My Story | Harvard Speech

Nick Shirley

Sep 11, 2026

This is why they want to kill me. I spoke at Harvard about exposing fraud with a $500 camera — Minnesota daycare scams, California Medicaid fraud, death threats, and the law they nicknamed the Stop Nick Shirley Act. This is my story. From the source. No spin.

Harvard Professor Warns of the Next Phase of Trump’s War: We’re Approaching a Dangerous World

A promise is a promise

A promise is a promise

Congressman and physician Raul Ruiz MPP 2001 made a pledge to serve.


By Theo Emery
Photograph by Mark Ostow

THE SUN WAS HIGH and the suit was hot. Raul Ruiz mopped his brow with a handkerchief as he walked the sunbaked sidewalks of Coachella, California, his hometown. He had a briefcase in his hand with a stack of carefully typed contracts inside.

In the scorching summer of 1990, the teenager in the itchy blue suit went from business to business with a proposition: Donate toward his college education, and he would return to the community as a physician. He made the pledge in writing, and he stapled the donor’s card to each signed contract.

These were long odds for the son of farmworkers in a poor and dusty community down the highway from the groomed golf courses of Palm Springs. Yet Ruiz made good on that promise. Not only did he return to Coachella to practice emergency medicine, but he came back with three graduate degrees from Harvard, including a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School.

Today the 41-year-old physician represents the 36th District of California in Congress after pulling off one of the campaign upsets of 2012. In a race that even close friends doubted he could win, he dislodged Mary Bono Mack from the seat she’d held since 1998.

Embattled Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign

Harvard-acquired Pentecostal collection offers up ‘gold mine’

BRANDI SIMONS FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Bishop Carlton Pearson was once a pastor of a megachurch in Tulsa, Okla., but eventually lost everything after he declared that eternal damnation was a human fiction.



By Lisa Wangsness

GLOBE STAFF

 AUGUST 08, 2016

It took years for Bishop Carlton Pearson, a groundbreaking African-American televangelist of the late 20th century, to visit the storage locker in downtown Tulsa, Okla., that contained the remains of his once-vaunted ministry.

In 2004, he had been branded a heretic by his Pentecostal peers for declaring that there was no such thing as eternal damnation, that a loving God would save everybody. His epiphany cost him almost everything: his 5,000-member church, his television ministry, his ranch for troubled kids. As his empire crumbled, his staff stuffed some 300 crates of video footage, music recordings, photos, notes, and financial records into storage.

“It was a corpse lying in a coffin,” he recalled. “The record of my existence on this planet was in these crates. It was devastating. Devastating.”

Now, Harvard plans to exhume that corpse and give it a new life online. Pearson’s media archive, which will be digitized by Andover-Harvard Theological Library over the next two years, will offer scholars a rare unvarnished glimpse inside the closely guarded world of evangelical religious broadcasting — and the careers of some of its most notable practitioners.